A note on sourcing: Salvatore Licitra (1968–2011) had one of the shortest major careers of any tenor in this collection, barely thirteen years from debut to death, and he never played stadiums or led a charity foundation. Following the project's practice, the sections on his "mass audience," his "crossover" work and his "philanthropy" stick to what is documented: the Met broadcast and the international press storm of May 2002, the Duetto crossover album and Colosseum concert with Marcelo Álvarez in 2003, his soundtrack work for Sally Potter's film The Man Who Cried (2000), and his family's decision to donate his organs after his fatal accident. Nothing here is invented to fill the template. The unevenness critics noted in his singing is also covered, not smoothed over. Sources include Wikipedia, the Southeast Missourian (AP) report on the Met debut, OperaWire, Classical Music Daily, Opera Today, AllMusic, Avvenire, NPR and Great Singers of the Past.
On the evening of Saturday, May 11, 2002, the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center was full of people who had come to say goodbye to someone who did not show up. The occasion was meant to be one of Luciano Pavarotti's last appearances as Mario Cavaradossi in Franco Zeffirelli's enormous production of Tosca, and the house had sold out at gala prices, with some seats reportedly going for as much as $1,875. About four thousand people had dressed for a farewell. Under the Met's starburst crystal chandeliers, which rise into the ceiling just before the lights go down, they were waiting to hear, possibly for the last time, the most famous tenor voice of the late twentieth century. Then, roughly two hours before curtain, the news went through the lobby that Pavarotti had cancelled, citing illness. He would not sing that night. His replacement was a thirty-three-year-old Italian most of the audience had never heard of: Salvatore Licitra.
The Met had been getting ready for this without knowing it would happen. On the evening of May 9, Licitra's manager had called him in Milan, and he landed in New York at nine the next morning. He had never sung on the Met stage. He had not rehearsed with this cast, he had never walked through Zeffirelli's crowded sets, and he did not know for sure that he would go on until about seven o'clock, an hour before the downbeat. James Levine, who was conducting, reportedly told him not to worry about anything because Levine would follow him. His Tosca, the Ukrainian soprano Maria Guleghina, told him to forget the staging and simply "live the roles." Few debuts at a major opera house have come with less preparation or a less friendly crowd. The audience had paid to see a legend, and the man walking into the painted church of Sant'Andrea della Valle in the first act was, to them, the reason they would not.
The first thing that changed the mood was "Recondita armonia." In this short aria the painter Cavaradossi compares the dark beauty of his lover Floria Tosca with the fair features of the stranger he has been painting. Licitra sang it in a big, dark, openly Italian voice with a ringing top, and the house began to lean toward him. The ovation after the aria went on for more than forty seconds, a long time in the middle of an act. The real test came in the third act, on the ramparts of the Castel Sant'Angelo, with "E lucevan le stelle." There the condemned Cavaradossi remembers a night of love while the clarinet plays the melody before him, and a tenor has almost nowhere to hide. Licitra sang the aria with a mix of restraint and anguish that won over even the people who had arrived feeling cheated. The applause after it lasted about as long as the first. At his solo curtain call it went on for around two and a half minutes. The audience had come for a farewell and stayed to welcome someone new. By the next morning the international press was using the phrase that would follow him for the rest of his life, and in the end weigh him down: the new Pavarotti.
Licitra reached the Met by an unusually winding path, and that path explains a good deal about his voice. He was born in Bern, Switzerland, on August 10, 1968, to Sicilian parents whose family came from the province of Ragusa. He grew up in Milan and first worked as a graphic artist, including for the Italian edition of Vogue. He began serious singing lessons only at about eighteen or nineteen, reportedly after his mother heard him imitating a singer on the radio. The early years were hard. He studied at the music academy in Parma and in the Corsi Verdiani, spent years singing in choruses, and did not make much progress until he became a pupil of Carlo Bergonzi at the great tenor's academy in Busseto, Verdi's home town. Most people who knew his career agree that meeting Bergonzi was the turning point in his development.
Bergonzi's school was a specific technical tradition, not just a famous name. At its center is appoggio, the Italian idea of "leaning" the voice on the breath. The singer keeps the lower ribs and the muscles of the abdomen and back in a steady, flexible expansion, so the breath reaches the vocal folds with even pressure and is not pushed up in bursts. From that support follows the Bergonzi ideal of legato: a line that runs smoothly from note to note, with the consonants placed quickly and cleanly so the vowel flow is never broken. Bergonzi was known for building his whole art on this rather than on sheer weight of voice, and he passed on to Licitra the idea that a Verdi phrase should be shaped on the word, with the vowels of the Italian text doing the expressive work.
Licitra's natural instrument was heavier than Bergonzi's, which put him in the lirico-spinto category: a lyric tenor with enough thrust in the sound to carry over the full orchestras of middle-period Verdi and Puccini. Critics described the voice as big, dark and "Italianate," with a baritonal warmth in the middle and lower range and a bright, metallic squillo above. Squillo is the ringing core of the tone, a concentration of acoustic energy in roughly the 2,500–3,500 Hz range, often called the "singer's formant." It lets a well-produced voice cut through an orchestra without extra effort, because the ear hears that band clearly even when the orchestra is louder overall. The New York Times praised his "ringing, powerful voice," and Opera Today's reviewer singled out his command of squillo as the quality that might put him among the great tenors.
The hardest part of any tenor technique is the passaggio, the transition zone roughly between E and G above middle C, where the voice has to shift from the full chest-dominant sound of the middle range to the more "covered" production of the top. In the Italian school a singer handles this by gradually modifying the vowels, darkening an open "ah" toward "aw" as the pitch rises. This keeps the larynx comfortably low and stops the sound from turning thin or shouted. At his best Licitra went through this zone with the rounded, covered sound he had learned from Bergonzi, which is why his top notes rang instead of cracking. His critics, however, noticed that the method did not always hold. Opera magazine later wrote about the "unevenness of his performances," and on some nights the voice sounded pushed, with the breath pressure taking over from the balance his teacher had taught. That tension between an instrument built for grandeur and a technique still settling in is central to understanding him. At its best, the voice sounded easily and generously within a real tradition. Under pressure, it showed how young his training still was.
Licitra's career developed around three defining periods, and each one showed a different side of what he could do.
The first was his time with Riccardo Muti at La Scala. After his 1998 debut as Riccardo in Un ballo in maschera, and a triumph in the same role in Verona, Licitra came to the attention of the Scala music director, who was known for demanding singers. Muti brought him to the house on March 2, 1999, as Don Alvaro in La forza del destino. The next spring, in March 2000, Licitra sang Cavaradossi in Muti's Tosca, a production later released on Sony Classical. That May he received the Premio Zenatello in Verona as tenor of the year. The key test came when Muti chose him as Manrico for the opening production of the 2000–01 season: Il trovatore, staged for the centenary of Verdi's death. Muti was strict about the score. Tradition expects every Manrico to cap the cabaletta "Di quella pira" with an interpolated high C that Verdi never wrote, and Muti would not allow it. Licitra sang the passage as written, the gallery objected, and the argument over the missing C filled the Italian papers. The episode says a lot about him as an artist. A young tenor with a spectacular top gave up the easiest applause of the evening out of respect for the text and a conductor's view of Verdi. The recording that came out of those performances catches him at his most disciplined: a Manrico of big, generous line whose heroism comes from phrasing, not show.
The second period, and the one that shaped his image, was his work as Cavaradossi and in Puccini generally. The Met debut in May 2002 tied him to the role for good, and it was also his last major performance: on July 30, 2011, he sang a concert Tosca at the Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under James Conlon, with Patricia Racette as Tosca and Bryn Terfel as Scarpia. In between, Cavaradossi served as his calling card at houses including the Vienna State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Royal Opera House in London. He added Calaf in Turandot and, for a short time, Dick Johnson in La fanciulla del West. His Puccini sometimes showed a real emotional intelligence. He understood that "E lucevan le stelle" is a memory more than a lament, and he often held back its opening phrases before letting the voice open fully at "e muoio disperato."
The third period was his move into heavier and riskier roles: the title parts of Andrea Chénier, Ernani and Don Carlo; Turiddu in Cavalleria rusticana and Canio in Pagliacci; Luigi in Il tabarro. These verismo and late-Verdi roles need exactly the dark middle voice and punch that Licitra had. They also put the most strain on the passaggio technique that was still his weak point. His 2006 Sony recital Forbidden Love included the "Improvviso" from Andrea Chénier, and a critic at Opera Today, who heard in the record "this could be the guy," praised in it both "dramatic abilities" and "ringing high notes." Onstage the results varied more, and some doubters kept saying he had been pushed too soon into roles that ruin voices. Still, on his good nights, as Canio or Chénier, he showed that his instrument had been made for these parts, and that the dark weight people had heard at the Met was not an accident.
Licitra never had the chance to change opera's place in popular culture the way Pavarotti did with the Three Tenors concerts. What he did have was a moment that showed how quickly opera could still become mass news in the new century. The Met debut spread far beyond the arts pages. Wire services, network news and newspapers around the world told it as a classic underdog story: an unknown flown in from Milan to stand in for the most famous tenor alive, winning over a hostile crowd of four thousand in one night. It had the shape of a sports story or a Hollywood script. For many people who had never been to an opera house, "Licitra" became the name of the understudy who got his chance, and the story reached people through the same channels that normally cover ball games and box-office numbers.
The recording industry moved fast to use the story. Sony, which already had him under contract, released a debut aria album. More importantly, Licitra appeared in the world of the televised opera special and the gala concert, where the art form met a general audience. His American concert debut had come at the Richard Tucker Foundation Gala in November 2001, an event known for being broadcast and for bringing star voices to viewers outside opera houses. After his death, the PBS series Great Performances published a memorial tribute to him, a sign of how far into public broadcasting his short fame had reached.
The most visible step toward a mass audience came in 2003, when Licitra and the Argentine tenor Marcelo Álvarez gave a concert in the open air at the Roman Colosseum. It was filmed and released on DVD as Duetto: The Concert at the Roman Colosseum. The setting was the point. The Colosseum is one of the world's best-known monuments, and by performing there two opera tenors were tying their art to the same mix of spectacle and heritage that had made the Three Tenors at the Baths of Caracalla a global event in 1990. The concert was designed as television: a ruined arena lit at night, two young tenors, and a program that moved between opera and popular song for viewers who would never pay for a seat at La Scala.
The cultural significance of this is easy to overstate and just as easy to dismiss. Licitra did not remake the opera audience. What his career does show is how, in the early 2000s, the industry tried to find and sell the next Italian tenor in the Pavarotti mold, a figure who could carry opera into living rooms. In that sense he was the last candidate for the Pavarotti succession who arrived before streaming and YouTube broke up the mass-media system. His was one of the final opera stories to be told almost entirely through newspapers, network TV and CDs.
The record of Licitra's crossover work is modest, and it should be told as it was. His first crossover project was cinematic. In 2000 he recorded, for Sony Classical, the music of Bizet and Puccini heard in Sally Potter's film The Man Who Cried, including Nadir's aria from Les pêcheurs de perles. The film starred Christina Ricci, Johnny Depp and Cate Blanchett, and Licitra's voice gave it some of its most memorable moments. For many cinemagoers this was the first time they heard him, before his name meant anything in the opera world.
His main crossover collaboration was Duetto, the 2003 album with Marcelo Álvarez, produced by Steve Wood and arranged and conducted by Daniel May with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The record was marketed openly to listeners of the Three Tenors and of "Time to Say Goodbye." It included two new songs by Francesco Sartori, who wrote "Con te partirò," alongside arrangements of Bach, Bizet and Gounod that had new lyrics and a pop rhythm section with electric bass and drums. Reviews were mixed. The AllMusic critic noted that the pieces had been "re-arranged and given new lyrics to sound as much like the other songs as possible," and praised the contrast between the two voices, Álvarez's smoothness against Licitra's darker color, while noting that the material did not ask much of them dramatically. Classical Music Daily later observed that his crossover work "drew mixed reactions from classical purists." Licitra did not answer those critics with manifestos. He answered them by going back to Chénier, Canio and Manrico, apparently treating the popular work as another route to listeners, not a replacement for the operatic one.
He built no charitable foundation, and it would be dishonest to claim one. The clearest act of generosity connected to his name came at the end of his life. On August 27, 2011, Licitra was riding his scooter near Donnalucata, in the province of Ragusa, on his way, according to Avvenire, to receive a "Ragusani nel Mondo" award honoring Ragusans who had made their mark abroad. He apparently suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while riding and crashed into a wall. His companion survived. He was taken to Garibaldi Hospital in Catania, where he lay in a coma for nine days and died on September 5, 2011, at forty-three. His family authorized the donation of his organs, and Italian reports said the donation would give other patients a chance at life. His body lay in state at Catania's Teatro Massimo Bellini, where the public came to say goodbye. At the time of his death he was booked to sing in Tokyo, London and Taipei in the following months.
It would be flattering and false to call Licitra a universal benchmark like Caruso or Pavarotti. His legacy is narrower, but real. His recordings with Muti, the La Scala Tosca and above all the Trovatore sung without its interpolated high C, remain important documents for students of Verdi style. They show a big spinto voice following the score with discipline instead of habit, and they are regularly used in discussions of how much respect the written text deserves. For young tenors, Licitra's career is also a warning that teachers take seriously. His rise from chorus singer to Met star in about four years, and the uneven results that followed, have become a standard example of how fast fame, heavy repertoire and a technique still being finished can pull against each other. Opera magazine's comment that the Met debut "catapulted him too quickly into the wrong, pressured kind of celebrity" is quoted less as a judgment of him than as a lesson for the industry.
His role in the history of opera distribution is equally specific. He belonged to the last generation of singers made famous by the old machinery: a wire-service headline, a network news segment, a major-label CD, a televised concert at a famous monument. The Duetto concert at the Colosseum and his Sony recordings belong to the late period of the physical-media classical industry, a system that treated tenors as potential mass stars and marketed them that way. Today's global cinema relays, streamed performances and viral clips carry on that ambition in a new form, and the young tenors who build careers on them are, whether they know it or not, heirs to a model that Licitra's generation tried out one last time.
What finally makes Licitra worth remembering is not the size of his career but the size of that one night. For two and a half hours in May 2002 he did what everyone who goes onstage dreams of and dreads: he stood where a legend was supposed to stand, in front of four thousand people who had not asked for him, and changed their minds with nothing but his voice. That is the most basic claim opera makes, that a human voice with nothing between it and the listener can turn disappointment into devotion within a single aria. Licitra proved it in front of the whole world, almost without warning. He died young, before his voice was fully settled, with engagements still on his calendar. Maybe that is why the recordings from his best years sound so moving now. You hear a big, dark, generous Italian voice at full strength, singing Cavaradossi's farewell to life, "E muoio disperato, e non ho amato mai tanto la vita" ("And I die in despair, and I have never loved life so much"), and it is hard not to hear the singer in the line as well as the character. His career was short and he knew the weight of great expectations, but on the nights that counted he reached the audience completely.
